Los Angeles, CAUSASaturday, March 12, 2011–Saturday, April 9, 2011

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Camille Rose Garcia.
Using the familiar fairy tale narrative from the famous Grimm Brothers’ story, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”, this series of paintings and drawings creates a modern day allegory for our
delusional relationship with nature, and the fantasies we tell ourselves about our own involvement in
its destruction.

Referencing the classic German Fairy tale, as well as the animated film by Walt Disney, Garcia weaves a monstrous modern and dysfunctional narrative using cartoony, Jungian archetypes, a psychedelic saturated color palette, and an obtuse combination of action-painter brush strokes and carefully controlled, calligraphic line work. Gold leaf and black glitter hang out together on the paintings in an uncomfortable but tolerated relationship. Leaking black castles, oily witches, and a gang of tired and dizzy dwarf miners accompany the Snow White and her fragile entourage of forest and lagoon animals as they traverse through caves, lagoons, and compromised natural landscapes, searching for an elusive happy ending.

Garcia’s omnipresent themes of the delusional fairy tales we tell ourselves, and the monsters required to maintain them, mirror the ongoing horror-show created by the military-industrial complex as it intersects uncomfortably with our natural world.

Camille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been displayed internationally and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Resnick Collection, and the San Jose Museum of Art, which held a retrospective of her work, entitled Tragic Kingdom, accompanied by a catalog of the same name. Garcia’s latest project, The Illustrated Alice in Wonderland (published by Harper Collins,) was a New York Times Bestseller. The recipient of the Stars of Design award from the Pacific Design Center, she recently moved to the Pacific Northwest after 38 years in Los Angeles.